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Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 6:59 pm
by jcrosbie
Once again resurrecting this topic. The week after conference comes out I use paulw's method to rip the subtitles from the Brightcove player, then can convert them to play offline with a downloaded .mp4 file. Unfortunately, these subtitles become available haphazardly afterwards. It's now Friday and the Sunday Afternoon session has subtitles available but Sunday Morning doesn't. Saturday Morning and Priesthood are online, but Saturday afternoon isn't?

I've reposted instructions on how to do this on my personal website and have been contacted by many other people throughout the world who are trying to do the same thing in their stakes - play offline video files with subtitles. So I know that many other stakes are having the exact same difficulties in trying to cater for their hearing impaired members. Many stakes do their sessions the weekend after General Conference in the US, so it makes it very difficult if the Brightcove player subtitles are uploaded late. The only alternative is to try to play off of the YouTube videos or rip the captions from there, but that is even more complicated and messy.

Does anyone know if there is a time-frame or ETA when the closed captions/subtitles for all the sessions will be available in the Brightcove player videos?

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 7:50 pm
by paulw
From my experience, the media library every now and then gets videos haphazardly added to it, as you've seen for this most recent general conference. Although it might seem like a lost cause I've actually had great success with submitting feedback via the "Feedback" link at the bottom of problematic pages. They are pretty responsive. I sent them an email just yesterday but you should submit feedback too! (Since I consistently find issues with the hosted content I just email the team directly now.) This most recent conference has misnamed videos, undownloadable videos, missing captions, and this is the first time I've seen videos hosted on cloudfront which is really messing with my web scraping scripts.

The best recourse of action we have is for you to tell everyone to submit feedback detailing the need for links to download the caption files. They most likely assume no one needs to download them because they never hear from anyone. If everyone would file feedback indicating the need they'd be much more likely to provide the link.

I've tried mitigating the lack of download links with a greasemonkey script detailed in a previous post (and I just fixed a bug/regression recently) but my script cannot account for their nonstructured hosting of files... though I'm starting to get a few ideas on things to try to fix that.

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2015 11:59 am
by Jimgiles2
This goes beyond stake usage. I download all of the sessions to a hard drive and use a WD player to watch talks as Sunday afternoon activities and/or to prepare lessons. My wife is not deaf, but her hearing is impaired, and the value of the videos is greatly reduced for her. It would seem that the process ought to automatically imbed CC in its MP4 files. If the files are there, neither my WD player, nor any of my computer-based video players can access them.

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2015 12:33 pm
by russellhltn
Jimgiles2 wrote:It would seem that the process ought to automatically imbed CC in its MP4 files.
Apparently there is no standard to do so.

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:11 pm
by petepaulos
Here is a list of all the caption files currently available for church videos.
http://media.ldscdn.org/dfxp/2015-12-00 ... dslorg.txt
There's 4454 urls. The listed items are in XML format and they're organized by: genre > product > track. if you scan the list, you'll hopefully catch on to how content is structured, and you'll hopefully be able to find the files you're looking for. This list isn't what we have planned as a long term solution, so new media won't be added to this list.

I work in the Media Library and we're looking for feedback. As far as a long term solution for getting subtitles on video downloads, I have a couple questions:

1. Would it be better to offer a separate subtitle file, or embed the caption file in the video download?
-example of embedded captions in video download
http://media2.ldscdn.org/assets/scriptu ... nload=true

2. For a separate subtitle file, which file format is preferred? (.XML, .SRT, .VTT, etc)

3. For accessibility to these separate subtitle files, is adding them to "downloads" in the Media library a good location? See picture for example
http://media.ldscdn.org/thumbnails/subt ... xample.jpg
This location is just an example, and the download could appear in a different location.

User "paulw" brought to my attention this forum post and I'd like to get things rolling quickly. A bit of a warning, adding a separate subtitle file to all our media would take just a couple weeks, however embedding caption files into the video downloads for all our media may take several years.

We're here to serve our users as best as we can, and your feedback will really help get things moving!
-Pete

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:24 pm
by wiscombe.peter
The thing that is confusing to me as a "user" is that the subtitles are often available for streaming videos, but not for the downloaded version. BUT, we are told to make sure to download the videos at home, rather than try to stream them on Sunday morning.

For example, we were showing the LIFT video for our 5th Sunday Priesthood/Relief Society lesson. We have a sister in the ward who is deaf, so we always try to make sure there are captions. The streaming version had captions, the downloaded version doesn't. This is especially ironic considering that the focus of the video is serving someone with a disability.

I appreciate any efforts that are being made to have the subtitles available in the downloaded version as well.

Having the SRT file does work well for certain media players. For the VLC media player, if the name of the video and the caption file are identical except for the suffix, and they are in the same folder/directory, it will play the captions/subtitles automatically.

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2015 6:55 pm
by lajackson
petepaulos wrote:1. Would it be better to offer a separate subtitle file, or embed the caption file in the video download? . . .
A bit of a warning, adding a separate subtitle file to all our media would take just a couple weeks, however embedding caption files into the video downloads for all our media may take several years.
Well, that would definitely sway my vote toward separate subtitle files. I am not smart enough to answer the other two questions.

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2015 7:29 pm
by russellhltn
petepaulos wrote:1. Would it be better to offer a separate subtitle file, or embed the caption file in the video download?
-example of embedded captions in video download
http://media2.ldscdn.org/assets/scriptu ... nload=true
Is that the right link? I clicked on it and got a MP4 file. I played it in Windows Media player, but saw no subtitles. I checked, and that function was turned on.

I think the biggest desire is to support as many players as possible. Both on the major computer platforms as well as any settop boxes that might be used for access (Roku, etc.)

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2015 10:41 pm
by sbradshaw
Is it possible to automatically batch-embed subtitle files into MP4s using a script? Like this, for example:
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3526 ... -container

Re: General conference video on media/USB players with subtitles/closed captions

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2015 7:04 am
by russelljd
russellhltn wrote:
petepaulos wrote:1. Would it be better to offer a separate subtitle file, or embed the caption file in the video download?
-example of embedded captions in video download
http://media2.ldscdn.org/assets/scriptu ... nload=true
Is that the right link? I clicked on it and got a MP4 file. I played it in Windows Media player, but saw no subtitles. I checked, and that function was turned on.

I think the biggest desire is to support as many players as possible. Both on the major computer platforms as well as any settop boxes that might be used for access (Roku, etc.)
The issue (at least as I understand it) is that Windows Media Player doesn't support embedded captions in an MP4 file. It will only read captions embedded into an WMV file (which would require the production of a whole other file type.) If I open the linked file in QuickTime or VLC I see captions displaying appropriately.